The Unexpected Mrs Hudson
by tepid sponge bath
Summary: Mrs. Hudson isn't just Sherlock and John's landlady - but that certainly doesn't mean she's a housekeeper!  No, she's an American undercover agent, actually.  None other than the amazing Mrs. Pollifax.


**Disclaimer: **The characters of _Sherlock _are not mine, nor is the story, nor are the characters from the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Mrs. Pollifax, bless her soul, belongs to Dorothy Gilman. I make no monetary profit from this.

**Note:** Written for this prompt on the Sherlock kink meme: _Mrs. Hudson = Mrs. Pollifax Run with it! _

This fic works under the assumption that things went _very_ differently in _Mrs. Pollifax on Safari_, which is where Mrs. Pollifax meets the man who will become her second husband. I apologize to Cyrus Reed and to all who love him! (Also, warning, it's a rather long-winded, introspective piece.)

**The Unexpected Mrs. Hudson**

Virgil was dead to begin with. That was where everything had started. Virgil was dead, and she had felt lost and useless and alone, and had already been considering jumping off the roof of her apartment building. Actually _jumping off the roof_. Looking back, she couldn't believe that she could ever have felt so _bleak_.

Well, she had loved Virgil. She still did, to tell the truth, and losing him had _hurt_ beyond words, and she still sometimes sat up at night wishing with all her heart that she could hear him call her his "lovable little goose" again. But if Virgil had _not_ died, she wouldn't have ever done all the things she had managed to do in the past few years.

She would never have become a spy.

She supposed, as she considered things over a cup of tea – a cuppa! – in her small, neat apartment – flat! – that she also ought to credit young Mr. Garbor for that, just as much as the tendency of people to shuffle off their mortal coils before their wives did. If he hadn't shown up when he did, well, she wasn't prepared to bet that she and her geraniums _wouldn't_ have made a very messy end. She still sent him Christmas cards, though she was never able to properly thank him for what he had unintentionally saved her from.

And her doctor over in the States too, of course. He had been the first to suggest that she try something more fulfilling than the deadly dull volunteer work she had been working on. Even if he had laughed at the notion of her entertaining the notion of espionage at her age. She sent him Christmas cards too.

Emily smiled to herself as she wondered what that nice young man would have to say if he learned that she actually had gone to the CIA to apply for the job – as if it was as simple as applying for work in a shop – and had been accepted, just like _that_.

Oh, but it definitely had not been peaches and cream all the way. The missions she got sent on almost always ended up being more complicated, more dangerous than Carstairs thought they should be. She liked to think that she had handled herself well though – she was still alive and kicking, even after several abductions, imprisonments, shootings, and numerous other encounters with very unpleasant people who had been very keen on seeing her dead.

She had eventually taken up karate. It was very useful.

Something clattered in the apartment – she really did try, but she still couldn't use the word 'flat' in her head without thinking of something evenly planar – upstairs. Emily put down her teacup, and sat up straighter in her chair, straining to hear if there was anything more. Both of her young men – yes, she was a little maternally possessive of them – were out, and there _shouldn't_ be any sounds from upstairs, unless, of course, Sherlock had another of his experiments going on.

There was another clatter. Someone was being very careless up there.

Emily Pollifax got up. It looked like karate was going to become very useful _indeed _in the near future.

She took care of her young men. She cleaned for them, cooked for them (they were hopeless, really, you'd think they'd learn to do that themselves, but John was no good at pottering about in the kitchen and Sherlock periodically forgot to feed himself for days if left to his own devices), did the shopping, and threw out body parts that were too far gone to be of any conceivableuse to Sherlock. She also occasionally removed would-be assassins and burglars from 221B Baker Street.

It wasn't even just out of gratitude to Sherlock for having taken care of Cyrus Reed. She shuddered involuntarily, as she always did when she thought of the man. Emily Pollifax had thought for a brief, wonderful moment of insanity that Cyrus was the second love of her life. How very wrong that she had been.

Cyrus Reed had turned out to be the assassin Aristotle. Mrs. Pollifax had been sent on safari to help identify the man, and he had been devilishly clever, hadn't he, pulling the wool over all their eyes. Poor Mr. Bimms had just been a very eccentric man who had wanted to see what it would be like to go on vacation. He certainly hadn't been expecting to be arrested for murder done in several countries.

And Mrs. Pollifax had _not_ expected to find out, after several months of being married to Cyrus, that he had been the killer all along. The worst part, aside from the monumental deception, had been that she hadn't had any _proof_, nothing concrete, nothing that would hold up in court, or even in a 911 call.

She had lived in utter terror for a few months more, unable to tell anyone, hoping that she could keep up the act of a loving CIA agent wife because she _knew_ without a doubt that she'd be a corpse faster than blinking if he suspected that she knew. She didn't want to think of what would have happened if Sherlock Holmes hadn't been called in to investigate the sudden death of a British diplomat.

Cyrus had been sentenced to death in Florida, and it was Sherlock who had provided the evidence against him, even if he wouldn't take credit for it. Mrs. Pollifax generally disapproved of the death penalty, but she felt that it had only been fitting in this case – it was almost like putting down a rabid dog.

She reviewed pressure points as she ascended the stairs, going as quietly as she could. While she _did_ keep a loaded revolver in a drawer in her rooms, she preferred not to use it. In her experience, waving a gun around was practically an invitation for other people to shoot at you (though she had done just that last month, but only because she had sprained her wrist ousting the _other _intruders from the previous day). Besides, if it turned out that she did need a gun, she knew where John Watson kept his Browning L9A1.

Mrs. Pollifax suppressed a sigh as she thought of John Watson. Now there was a sweetheart, and no mistake. It had been an honest mistake on her part when she had thought that he and Sherlock were together. And she had even gone so far as to hint heavily that they might not be needing two bedrooms – it had been a little embarrassing, but she had been so glad at the thought of Sherlock finally having found someone that she couldn't help herself. (And so what if it was a man? Mrs. Pollifax believed that it took all sorts to make a world, and she would politely but firmly disagree with anyone who thought otherwise.) Well, he had found someone, actually, even if it wasn't in the direction she had hoped. She felt infinitely better knowing that John would be there, with his Browning if necessary, whenever Sherlock went chasing recklessly after the criminal elements of London. (And _there_ was a man who could use a gun. Mrs. Pollifax had seen that crack shot of his first hand when she had run after Sherlock after realizing _too late_ that there was something dreadfully wrong about the cabbie. It was better than anything she could have managed with her old revolver.) And she knew in her heart that as long as the doctor was around, she would never again find Sherlock dangerously overdosed on cocaine, as she had just last year when she had first come to England to meet a contact with information on the elusive criminal mastermind Moriarty.

It had horrified her that the brilliant, almost _luminous_ young man she had met in Florida could ever, ever feel the need to do that to himself. And the reason he gave for it – that he had been bored, that his mind rebelled at stagnation – she had wanted to smack him and gather him in her arms at the same time, it was so desperate and so silly and he had _meant_ it. She had vowed then and there that she would look after him, take care of him however she could, even if she knew she would never be able to really get inside his head. So she had only been too pleased when Carstairs came to London himself to tell her that she would need to stay undercover for longer than she ever had before.

"_It could take years, maybe," he had said in that gruff way of his. "He's a slippery fish, this Moriarty. Almost everything Porlock gave you about that cipher turned out to be a dud. Mornajay Upstairs is almost starting to disbelieve his existence." He sighed, a world-weary government man with too much on his mind. "You don't look too disappointed. This soggy little island treating you well, eh?"_

"_I like this 'soggy little island,'" she had answered primly. She did like it here. It was a decided point in England's favor that she could wear all the hats she liked without her neighbors looking at her askance. "Besides, I've found a young man."_

_Carstairs had raised his eyebrows in a look of perfect incredulity. "Mrs. Pollifax, I didn't think you were the type."_

"_It's not like that. Remember the detective who caught Cyrus? Well, he needs help, and he can't – or won't – get it anywhere else, and I don't intend to leave him like that."_

"_Sherlock Holmes? The almost-psychopath? I thought he didn't want anything to do with the Company."_

"_I'm not _just_ a spy, Carstairs." Mrs. Pollifax had given him a very meaning look. _

"_No, you're not, are you? Emily Pollifax, you will never cease to amaze me. I'll send Bishop around to help you settle in more permanently. You're going to have to be Mrs. Hudson for a while yet, but we'll see to it that you do it in comfort."_

_Bishop had arrived later that week with the keys to 221 Baker Street. Sherlock and John had followed soon after. _

She wished that the two of them would get together. True, John was seeing that nice girl Sarah, but there wasn't anything special there, at least not compared to that _electricity _between the doctor and the detective, and she hoped they'd all realize it sooner rather than later.

Now, enough woolgathering. Mrs. Pollifax had learned a thing or two from Sherlock, and she can tell that someone was hiding to the right of the door to the sitting room, most likely lying in wait to take the next person to enter by surprise.

It was a silly move. For one thing the person they were trying to surprise was _Sherlock Holmes_ (unless someone had suddenly gotten a very intense grudge against John Watson, and even then they'd still have to put up with Sherlock). And for another, Mrs. Pollifax had noticed that people who intended to take you by surprise were that much easier to surprise themselves.

She stepped nonchalantly into the sitting room, sensed the intruder ghost up behind her, shifted her stance, drove an elbow into his stomach, and, while he was still gasping for breath, deftly administered a karate chop to the side of his neck with a fierce "Hi-_YA!_"

The man dropped like a stone.

"You weren't expecting me, were you, dear?" she asked him as she straightened her blouse.

There was a trick she did with this kind of trespasser (that is to say, alone, slightly built, and out like a light). It involved splashing some Guinness on them, dragging them down the stairs out the back door, and into the alley behind the little garden she was working on (she was trying geraniums now). There, she would proceed to arrange them artfully before going back inside to call 999 (not 911, though her fingers still slipped sometimes) to complain about the drunk passed out behind her house.

It was much simpler than calling about an armed housebreaker. And Sherlock did hate having cops in the house. He had a reason to be nervous too. Mrs. Pollifax knew very well what he had hidden in the toe of the Persian slipper under his bed.

Still, she mused once the police had come to take the man away, that was the second intruder she'd had to take care of this week. She'd have to speak to Mycroft about it the next time he came around for tea. The frequency of the incidents was starting to become alarming. (She was pretty sure that it was all right that Mycroft knew who she was – Mrs. Pollifax was rather certain that the United States and the United Kingdom were more or less on friendly terms, though they both made it a point never to talk about work.)

Well, it was business as usual for now. She sent Bishop several encrypted files over an encrypted email (the internet was an amazing thing – it seemed only yesterday that she was getting shot at for the sake of delivering microfilm!) , spoke with Jane on Skype (and she dropped the English accent when she talked with her daughter, if only so that Jane wouldn't think her too affected), and prepared a nice supper for herself and her tenants upstairs (they weren't home yet, and she wasn't worried, but chances were they wouldn't have eaten yet, and John, at least, would be dismayed to find that the pair of smoker's lungs in the fridge had dripped formaldehyde over everything). Of course, she told herself as she waited to hear them crashing through the front door, she would have to remind them that she wasn't their housekeeper. It wouldn't do for them to become too dependent.

It certainly wasn't what she had planned when she had volunteered to join the CIA. But Mrs. Pollifax was content go on being Mrs. Hudson for a long time yet.


End file.
